Transcription: Elvin Jones - Your Lady

Lately I keep doing the bulk of the hard work on these things, only to run out of steam in the last 12 bars, but David in the comments was able to shame me into finally finishing this up. Here at last is the intro and head of John Coltrane's Your Lady, from the Live at Birdland record, with Elvin Jones on drums. This contains the groove that inspired my "Elvin's Afro Waltz" series, which has been dominating my own practice time recently. The essence of that groove is a linear left hand/BD/HH part in 6/8 played under a standard jazz waltz cymbal pattern-- see the first entry in the series for an explanation of that.

There can be a pretty wide range of dynamics within the parts on each measure-- especially on the lower side; in making the transcription there were a lot of places where I've written a rest, though I suspect Elvin was ghosting a note to the point where it is inaudible. In general I've tried to minimize notating the internal dynamics of the parts-- it would be easy to go overboard with that, rendering the thing unreadable-- so it'll be up to you to study that closely. I think it's best to use this as a listening and study guide, rather than as a literal map for duplicating the performance.

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YouTube audio after the break